Biography

1964

1965

Her brother Juan Miguel is born, her companion and playmate. Together they attend the local school in their hometown.

1971

She moves to the city with her family. As the first years of her life were spent in contact with nature the city means a big change for her.

1972

She attends the Concepcion Arenal Public School in Madrid for her General Education.

1978

She took her high school studies, both junior and senior, at the Mariana de Austria Institute. She meets art professor Requena, who sees in her great potential for plastic and creative arts and she starts to feel painting as a language with which she can canalize and communicate her feeligs.

1979

Mr. Tierno Galvan is named mayor of Madrid and he recuperates the old ways and popular fairs, carnivals and musical concerts in the city streets and plazas and a very young Alián participates in the arrival of the democracy with happiness and joy and a guitar, “my faithful companion”, as liked to say, while she composes poems and songs, songs which sings herself

1980

Next to her love for music and poetry, during these years she feels a special sensibility with the problems in Southamerica and she frequents the Instituto Iberoameriano (The Latinamerican Institute), where she attends meetings and conferences and meets poets Felix Grande and Paca Aguirre. Her intelectual formation grows: she reads the works of Miguel Delibes, Garcia Marquez, Brecht, and above all, philosophy (Platon, Kant, Fromm).

1982

Her didactic aptitudes and her family´s suggestion drive her to enroll at the Pablo Montesinos College of Law, but once her great love for painting is defined she enrolls at the Madrid Complutense College of Art . It is at this moment when painting becomes the central point of he existence and in an act of generous friendship she decides that her name for this art will be “Alián”, uniting her name Ana to that of a great friend of hers.

1984

She meets theater actor C. Muñoz, with whom she will share a great frindship. With him she gets to know the theater world inside, its scenography and actors, who awake in her imaginario sketches and paintings related to the charaters in works as important as The Cherry Garden, remembering Checkov, August Moon, etc…

1985

She takes complementary studies at the university taking art curses given at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. I. Ochoa, Eva Lootz, Navarro Baldeweg, Carlos Leon, Dokoupil.... There, in the experimental painting course “El Torreon” she paints an important part of her first works and from that moment on, The Bellas Artes School of Art will become an important point of refference to her hroughout her life. She moves to Sevilla for few months where she works as a commercial graphic designer. She travels to Morrocco, visiting diferent cities, absorving their culture.

1986

Once she returns to Madrid she meets a young man with whom she will share her hopes and a great part of her life. She moves her studio to the Juanelo Street near the Rastro (Flea Market in Madrid), an area of the city that is a meeting place for painters and artists I general. She takes part in a collective exhibition in the Woman´s Week, in the Culture Trust in Mostoles. (Patronato de Cultura de Mostoles). It is due to this exhibition that she is offered work as art teacher and coordinator of the the exibition room in the Kaleidoscope Cultural Center. This allowes her to put into practice a great
pedagogic job, developing a process and growth through the relationship between philosophy and art.

1987

She cooperates with an important set desiger, G. Carrascal, in the exhibition “The Antique Toy” at the Casa de Vacas in Madrid. She designs the billboard for “Playing, Playing!” and particitcipates in the assembly of the said exhibition. She is a member of the jury for the painting prize at the Centro Municipal Board.

1989

She is chosen to participate in the exhibition Work of Free Studies for drawing and painting from the natural, organized by the Bellas Artes Circle in Madrid. The first signs of sickness appear and she is dignosed a serious illness but in spite of the threat on her heath she fights with an ever present enthusiasm, a great fortitude. Her work rhythm increases, creating a great number of paintings at that time.

1990

She is involved with the third world situation she paints many of her social denouncement paintings where she expresses with the language of color and
the deformity of the human figure the pain that goes with injustice, war and hunger.
She exhibits at the Kaleidoscope Cultural Center her first works of social meaning, showing the disasters of war, hunger and drug abuse in the young. She also exhibits her first intimate paintings where she tells us about the loneliness of the human being, and also, as she used to say, “I want to leave in my paintings a ray of hope, using color the way I do.” She takes several trips to Paris with her students, to show them and study with them in person the paintings of the masters of the impressionism at the d´Orsay Museum, Georges Pompadour Art Center, etc., also visiting the Monet studio at Giverny.

1991

She travels to Cuenca, Barcelona and visits the most important Spanish museums, in order to study the abstract art of the day and the last trends, as well as the light in the Sorrolla Museum, in Madrid. It, to the is during these years that she travels to Italy, to Venice´s Bienal, which in that year´s edition their assemblies are full social criticism against war, hunger and violence, causing in Alián a great impact, especially Tapiés, who was granted first price in this exhibition. She loves travelling and visits Ireland, Portugal, Tenerife, …. trips that always contribute to her personal experiences and make her reflect about life and art.

1992

During the years 1989, 1990 and 1991, she is fully engrossed in her pedagogic and social project creating a Comic workshop for the young, with its culmination on The Comic´s Week at the end of the school term, with an exhibiting project and series of conferences given by the best professionals in the matter. She cooperates with the Women´s Council, organizing exhibitions, giving conferences and designing catalogues and agendas. In these nine years full of work and projects with her students she creates the groups Frida Kahlo and Minerva, which are still working today with the strength and love that Alian transmitted into them. At the same time she works untiringly on her Social Denouncement paintings, with violent colors and the deformation of the human figure to comunicate her social compromise fr a better world for all. Later surges in her a philosophic stage. Her palette is full of blues and violets in an existential line where she shows the most intimate feelings of the human being.

1993

Her personal growth and that of those around her, were an essential part of her life, for this reason she dedicates her time to transmit to others all that she learns, in her trips, her painting and her philosophy of life

1994

She moves her studio to Arcicóllar, (Toledo), to her grandparents´ home, where she has ample space to paint freely works of big format. She starts a work of investigation that leads to Orphism where expressionism, geometric constructivism and plain colors play forms in paintings of great dimensions. She asks for leave of absence from her job and goes to Tenerife looking for a more adequate weather for her health condition. In the island she cooperates in a project for the Art Center Museum for the city of Arafo. She contacts the workshop for Canarian Songwriters and assists often to their concerts, a result their frequent meeting a good friendship develops with them.

1995

A relapse in her illness forces her return to Madrid, where she dies on September 17, 1995, leaving so many projects and hopes unfinished… Her ashes rest in the Cantabrian sea, in those waters that she loved so much.

ALIÁN (1964 – 1995)

Succinct Biography

Ana Agudo Sánchez “ALIÁN” is born on July 27, 1964 in the town of Arcicóllar, in Toledo (Spain). Her artistic temperament is awaken at an early age. She studied art in Madrid and Seville.
In the Circulo de Bellas Artes school of art in Madrid she attended art workshops with Ochoa, Eva Lutz, Navarro Baldewerg, Carlos Leon and Doucoupil… where she found the adequate space to develop her creative activities, as well as in the Torreón( The Tower), an experimental workshop of free art.

From a very young age she carried out a great teaching work, sharing her knowledge and art capacities at the Kaleidoscope Cultural Center, in the Mostoles Culture Trust, where she shaped her various projects, outstanding the creation of Comic Workshop for youths and the colectives Frida Khalo and Mierva for women painters. She also cooperated with the Woman´s Council giving conferences, designing catalogs and agendas. At the same time she organized paint and sculpture exhibitions for novel artits of the moment.

A great lover of travelling, Alián had been to almost every corner of the Spanish geography. She also travelled to several other countries, such as Italy, Portugal, France, Ireland, Great Britain and Morrocco, travels that helped her feel the drama of the human being in very different situations, putting herself in the skin of those who suffered. That was how her works on social protest were born, protest about discriminaton, drug abuse, war, loneliness, anguish, and the final Abiss trilogy, a summary of the desperation of man at the limit of his existence, works with which she tried to transform the word

After a long and difficult illness, which didn´t slow down her rythm nor the love she felt for life and her work, she died in Madrid on September 17, 1995. Her ashes rest on the waters of the Cantabric, that sea she loved so much